Friday, 8 January 2016

Jamie and the Magic Torch

Jamie was a boy of 10. He went to
school, had some friends and went to Cub Scouts like a lot of other boys. Jamie
was a normal boy in a fairly average sized town in England.
He didn't really like football but he played it anyway just so he could have
friends, as most of them played football too. He went to Cubs because his
parents said it would be good for him to have something to do in the evenings
once a week.

Jamie wasn't bad at many things. He
didn't like Science or Maths, as they were too boring. There was no imagination
in trying to explain how something worked or how many pieces of one thing could
be divided into other things. He didn't like Geography and he didn't like
religious education. However he wasn't "bad" at them, he just did
about average.

What Jamie was good at were
subjects like History or English, or Drama. Subjects where he could express
himself and use his imagination. His teachers all told his parents just how
much he enjoyed writing and how good his stories were. His mother had tutted
and said that that might be true but he had to focus on being good at all the
other things he DIDN'T like quite so much if he ever wanted to go to university
and be a doctor or a vet or a judge.

Jamie didn't want to be a doctor.
Or a vet. Or a judge. Jamie wanted to be like Robin Hood or Richard the
Lionheart or Sir Walter Raleigh or Spartacus. He wanted to be a hero and have
everyone know his name. Another thing that Jamie loved was comic books. He
revelled in the classic stuff like Batman and the Avengers but also loved stuff
that had a twist. Things like Hellblazer or Preacher. Comics that were
supposedly way above his reading level and had stuff that only grown ups were
meant to read. Jamie didn't much like the sex bits of the comics but he loved
the way that the hero in Preacher wasn't such a good guy. Preacher was rude,
aggressive and killed people but ultimately he was a hero because he tried to
do the right thing. And as for Hellblazer. Well, John Constantine had once sent
a man to hell and told him he deserved it...but again, Constantine
was a good guy and he'd done that to save an innocent baby.

Jamie dreamed that he could fly
like a bird. That he could fight twenty men at once (even though he knew they
probably wouldn't attack him one at a time like in the films). He wanted to be
a spy like James Bond. He wanted to do martial arts like Jason Bourne. The more
Jamie thought about this the more his imagination ran riot and he loved to
write stories, sometimes spending hours in his room scribbling in an exercise
book about heroic deeds and righteous justice against abominable villains.

For Jamies 11th birthday his
grandmother bought him a torch. It was a special torch because it could shine
lights in many different colours and flash and even make noises. Jamie loved
this present as it made him feel he was a superhero. He would pretend the torch
was magical, waving it around his bedroom. Red for kill (like in those old
sci-fi films where the lazer guns made people glow and their skeletons show and
then they dissapeared). Green for stun (like in Star Trek). Orange for
sleepiness, so people could be taken prisoner. Blue for freeze, like in an old
TV show he'd seen in his father's DVDs called Logan's
Run.

Jamie loved the torch as it fed his
imagination. He wrote stories and would talk to anyone who would listen about
how he was going to be a great writer like JK Rowling or Suzanne Collins. His
family would laugh and say that was all well and good BUT he had to think about
his other subjects too.

Jamie wasn't a bad boy. Nor was he
particularly good. He wasn't super popular at school but neither was he hated
by other children. He was just a normal, average 11 year old with a very vivid
imagination and that made him happy. On long car journeys with his parents he
would pass the time staring out of the window making the speeding scenery part
of his dreams and fantasies. Jamie was happy because his imagination was a
place where he could be a king, a prince or even a god.

One day Jamie's parents got his
school report. It noted that Jamie was in the top three in his class for
English and the top ten for history but he was very, very low in his other
subjects. His parents sat him down and his mother said to him (while staring at
him and speaking very slowly and clearly) that he had to think about his future
and not think so much about "silly things" and his "silly
fantasies". Jamie was sad and tried to argue that his love was writing and
his mother told him not to interrupt and repeated everything she'd just said
twice until Jamie sat quietly and didn't argue any more.

A few days later when Jamie's
mother walked into his bedroom without knocking, to see how he was getting on
with his Biology homework, she found Jamie pretending to be a space soldier,
using his torch as a ray gun and shining it on the walls, changing the colours.
His mother shouted at him that he would only ever be a shelf stacker in
Sainsbury's and that he shouldn't be wasting time on his stupid torch. She
demanded that Jamie give it to her. He refused and she stepped closer and held
out her hand demanding it. Jamie realised that she had no idea how he felt and
didn't know just how miserable he was when he wasn't able to use his
imagination. He gave it to her, hoping that she would calm down later and would
give it him back. Before he could do anything else she snapped the torch in
half and threw the pieces into the waste paper bin. Jamie's face crumpled and
he started to cry. His mother folded her arms and simply glared at him.

"You won't thank me now Jamie
but you'll thank me later. We do enough for you as it is."

Jamie was full of grief. His mother
had ruined the toy his grandmother had given him. She had snapped his toy in
half and he felt that everything he ever wanted to do was wrong. He shouted
back:

"YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING FOR ME.
I FUCKING HATE YOU!!!"

His mother glared at him and her
eyes filled with tears. Not tears of pity but tears of anger and sadness at
what Jamie had said. With her lower lip trembling she waved her index finger at
him and said:

"Right you ungrateful little
sod! No more lifts to Cubs on a Thursday and no more comic books!"

His mother than sat in her
favourite armchair in the lounge and cried for two hours because Jamie had
sworn at her and said that she didn't do anything for him. When his father came
home he spoke to Jamie's mother and then came and told Jamie he had to go and
say sorry for upsetting mum. Jamie refused, staring through swollen eyes at the
ruined torch in his wastepaper bin.

In the days and weeks that followed
Jamie slowly lost the desire to read all the books that he could lay his hands
on. He tried to keep up his passion for reading but he felt that something in
him had died when his mother broke his torch in half and threw the pieces away
in front of him. He no longer wrote volumes of stories in pencil in his
exercise books, the smudges where he'd lent on them making some bits hard to
read. Now he just drifted. His marks in English went down but still remained
about average. Jamie could write a story or understand a character's motivation
in a tale, better than most other people including his teachers. But his desire
had gone. His grades in other subjects again became average but overall he was
doing well enough to be considered for the second stream at school. There were
four in total, with one being for the very clever kids. Two was the slightly
better than normal. Jamie's imagination had died with his magic torch. He felt
that no one cared how he felt and he was told off constantly at home for
"sulking" and making his mother feel bad as she had to come home from
a hard day at work to see his pouting features.

His teachers said they were worried
about the change in this once smiling and happy young man. His mother said to
the deputy head on the next open evening that it was undoubtedly because of the
comic books that he read. She hadn't noticed that Jamie had put them in the
wardrobe months ago and didn't read them any more.

Jamie took no further love in any
subjects at school. He trudged through life feeling alienated and without the
zone of fantasy that he'd so gleefully escaped to in the past, he was unhappy
and isolated.

The torch wasn't magic in any
'real' sense of that word. It was simply a spark that lit up the world inside
Jamie's head. When his mother destroyed it, Jamie's dreams became inaccessible
to him.

Years later and Jamie began to
write again. He wrote novels for children about bullies and magic and demons
and monsters. Stories like the ones he loved to write as a kid. He wrote other
books too. Ones that weren't for children. Ones that were dark and sinister and
had some people who read them say that Jamie needed help.

Jamie didn't need help. What he
needed and had always needed was someone to tell him that his imagination was a wonderful thing.